I still have a long way to go, but I see NC as the next phase in our "shared file" evolution. It looks like I could simply recreate the same structure (or something very similar) as what we have in our file server, inside NC. If I went this route, then most things are similar to what we already have, but we get some added features, such as the ability to share files with third parties without resorting to email. We have times where the email attachment size limit comes into play, and this would allow that to all go away. NC would also give us versioning outside of my backups, which might be nice if we trained people to use them. If we went with NC, we would also likely enable remote access, which added to the multiplatform clients, would basically make the files always available for our users, even if they are not on premise.
One main benefit, is the ability to sync select files to the user's local disk. This should have a pretty good performance benefit, especially with half of my users at the site that is across the WAN.
so far I have just fired up an online demo, and played around a bit. With all I typed above, I could probably make this very similar to a basic file server, but I want to explore the other differences between NC and a file server, because there may be things we can do that are fundamentally different with NC, and they may be better in the long run, the use of tags being a good example. I also need to think about the concept of a user having any dedicated, potentially semi-private, shares versus everyone using a common share that is setup by the admin user (basically what we have now). Our current storage philosophy is based on how we used an old simple NAS that used to have no permissions, and only the most basic folder structure.